“Bauer also will play that role for Obama’s new political network, Organizing for America, and the Democratic National Committee, which is administering the network,” explained a Feb. 2009 article in Politico, “Bauer’s new, unmatched legal power.”

In its Aug. 2011 Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS), the State Department said that rail currently has the capacity to transport over 1 million barrels of tar sands per day to market.

“Even in a situation where there was a total freeze in pipeline capacity for 20 years, it appears that there is sufficient capacity on existing rail tracks to accommodate shipping…through at least 2030,” the SEIS explained. “[S]tatistics from the Department of Transportation,…conservatively estimated that the existing cross-border rail lines from Canada to the U.S. could accommodate crude oil train shipments of over 1,000,000 bpd (barrels per day).”

As a case in point, BNSF is eager to see KXL fail, seeing it as an economic opportunity of epic proportions for its rails.

“We’re very concerned this has flown under the public’s radar,” Peter LaFontaine of the National Wildlife Federationtold Bloomberg in a May 1, 2013 story. “The public doesn’t seem to have the same sort of attention for pipeline expansions as they do for pipeline construction. But we’re talking about a lot of crude.”

Cashing in on Destructive Game of Tar Sands “Whac-A-Mole”

In a Nov. 2012 article on rail serving as an alternative midstream method to pipelines for tar sands, Grist Senior Editor Lisa Hymas described the situation as one akin to a game of “Whac-a-Mole.”

“It’s like a big game of Whac-a-Mole, except what’s at stake isn’t a cheap teddy bear at Chuck E. Cheese but the health of the planet and civilization as we know it,” she wrote.

Rather than cashing in on juvenile toys with tokens gained from winning several rounds of Whac-a-Mole, though, Dunn and SKDK are gaining real-life tokens – fat wads of cash – cashing in on this high-stakes game of tar sands Whac-a-Mole.